The Married Man by Edmund White

In Edmund White's most moving novel yet, an American living in Paris finds his life transformed by an unexpected love affair.

Austin Smith is pushing fifty, loveless and drifting, until one day he meets Julien, a much younger, married Frenchman. In the beginning, the lovers' only impediments are the comic clashes of culture, age, and temperament. Before long, however, the past begins to catch up with them. In a desperate quest to save health and happiness, they move from Venice to Key West, from Montreal in the snow to Providence in the rain. But it is amid the bleak, baking sands of the Sahara that their love is pushed to its ultimate crisis.

Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and, most recently, Hotel de Dream. His nonfiction includes City Boy and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. White lives in New York and teaches at Princeton.

Unrated Critic Reviews for The Married Man

Kirkus Reviews

In something of a reversal, the Providence sections introduce complications the initial set-up didn’t anticipate: Austin discovers the malignant, politically correct demagoguery of academia—but it’s Julien who develops the much more serious problem of full-blown AIDS.

Publishers Weekly

Book Reporter

And here is his deconstruction of Disney World:
"But something about being here, in this unreal place dedicated to
such cheerless, standardized pleasure, a place that was just a hot,
sunny void in central Florida, a joy that was paid for, dollar by
dollar, as a meter ticked rapidly and chains tu...

Entertainment Weekly

Edmund White labors for deep emotional effect in The Married Man, the tragic semiautobiographical story of a gay romance between Austin, an HIV-positive American living in Paris, and Julien, a married French architect  but doesn't quite pull it off.